


Variations on the Word 'Love'

by montparnasse



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-12
Updated: 2015-06-12
Packaged: 2018-04-04 03:19:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4123831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some situations, Isabela decides, were just made for metaphor:  love, for example, or impending death, or both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Variations on the Word 'Love'

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skybone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skybone/gifts).



> For skybone and a fantastic prompt on tumblr! I hope this suits; there is, at least, a viable fix for _this_ catastrophe. ♥

Later, in retrospect, much, much later, so much later that the rot of the sewers becomes an amusing perfume to add to the story and what most reasonable people would call “a rare and grievous disaster” becomes “a hilarious joke” to tell when one or both of them have become too drunk for any messy inhibitions or sense of propriety whatsoever, Isabela supposes she’ll probably laugh about it. She’ll take another drink to the sublime healing influence of memory, shake her head, and kiss Hawke on the neck, sloppy-giddy-drunk, and miss altogether, landing on her left breast instead, the way she always does.

But for now, with the cave-in recent enough to still be smoldering chalky-white and the cut in her elbow still raw enough to smart in the claustrophobic air, Isabela turns to Hawke and says, “This is completely your fault, you know.”

“Oh, _my_ fault? Who was it whom—”

“ _Whom_ , Andraste’s tits, don’t pedant at me. I’m almost certain you aren’t even using it correctly.”

“Excuse you, I’m not done with my recounting of recent events yet and I’ll thank you not to interrupt my pedantry. Anyway! Who was it who wanted to come this way in the first place, I ask you? ‘Oh, Hawke,’ she says, throwing out her ample bosom, ‘look, it’s so dark and decrepit and _dangerous_ , oh, Marian, it’s practically romantic, I’ve gone all _tingly_ , please, oh, please, Marian, _let’s_.’”

“Shut up,” snaps Isabela, “I’ve never sounded like that in my life. Just—shut it.”

“That’s not what you said last night,” says Hawke, reflexively, and, “would you stop glaring at me? See, I’m trying to be _resourceful_ instead of flinging around accusations like so many sharp projectiles. One of us here has to hoist up her knickers and find a way out.”

“Sorry, sorry. I don’t mean to be such a tit, it’s just, first the bloody _spiders_ running about, and now this. Not even a body to loot.”

“No,” Hawke agrees, slipping an arm around her waist, “but if we’re going to die of starvation or any of the various filthy diseases one is likely to contract in a cave, at least we get to do it together.”

“My hero,” says Isabela, laughing in spite of, or maybe because of, the situation. It’s hard to tell. “Always putting things into perspective for me.”

“Don’t I just.”

“We could wait and see if Aveline and Merrill come looking,” she suggests, wiping a bit of Maker-knows-what off her cheek. “They’ll notice we’re gone before long, what with the trail of destruction and general disrepair of the place, and Aveline’s manful self-preservation instincts will kick in and they’ll come looking to us to save the day.”

“Or we could develop black lung and live out the rest of our miserable days on raw spider mush.”

“Always with the perspective,” Isabela mutters, and surveys the walls for an opening, an out, a ledge—anything at all.

In the years (and years, and years, her mind helpfully supplies) she’s spent with Hawke, for as long as they’ve been doing this—the plundering and exploring and slumming and drinking and fucking and laughing and forgiving—thing, whatever it is, she’s felt like an accidental pathfinder, a cartographer mapping out uncharted territory with every touch and look and word and careless misstep on her rocky shores, blissfully, thrillingly lost at sea with a sunburst of new freckles and the tilt of Hawke’s mad grin for her map. Funny, she thinks, how it all once seemed so ridiculously fairytale and out of reach for her, off-limits, a secret twining of time and life she would never let herself dream so that she never had to wake up from it and see that all these loves weren’t really hers and she didn’t deserve them and they’d finally decided to drop the charade and stop.

_I’d rather have coin_ , she remembers telling Hawke early one morning when they’d finally woken up together one too many times to be anything less than habit, and she feels, years later, more or less an arsehole of incomparable magnitude. Which could and probably should be rectified right here, right now, given the dire life-threatening gravity of the situation and the fact that she’s certain she can hear _something_ lumbering along in one of the pathways to the south, but then Hawke just has to look at her like that—the cut-glass, sea-shrewd eyes, the pale lilt of her chin and her jaw to her neck—and gives her a closed-eyed kiss, and all the words turn right to cotton and dissolve, useless, in Isabela’s throat.

“What?” asks Hawke, one hand brushing her wrist as she picks up a large stick and knocks on a few rocks; disturbingly, someone knocks back in a bizarre, complicated staccato and then immediately stops.

“Well,” says Isabela, and feels the familiar thundering of her heart swelling up against her ribs, and then feels it still just as soon. “I mean, I’ve known you for so long—sometimes it’s hard to believe how long, actually, being stuck in this rathole as long as I’ve been—”

“No one’s making you stay in this rathole now, Captain Pretentious.”

“Would you _listen_ , Hawke, you know what I mean. And it’s only pretentious if you don’t know what you’re talking about, besides,” she says, feeling her heart come untethered again at the bright peal of Hawke’s laugh, echoing across the stones, settling in Isabela’s belly. “What I’m trying to say is, we go together pretty well—we practically live together, with all your girly things in my drawers—and ever since I met you, I want to be better, and I want to try new things, and sometimes I get the urge to sing in the tavern or rip off my clothes and run through Hightown naked when I know you’re waiting for me, which would only be to their benefit, I might add, and it’s all frankly been the best thing I’ve ever had in my life—never expected to have it at all—and, well, you’ve got a fantastic arse and you make me laugh like nothing else, and, so—I wouldn’t mind so badly. If this is all we got.”

Hawke straightens up from where she’s examining a crack in some limestone and looks over at her, blinking, frowning, watching her as if she’s breathed in too many sewer-fumes already. “Isabela, I know we’ve reached the point where we can communicate in hand gestures and with our mouths full and all that, but I don’t know what you’re saying right now because you’re not actually saying anything.”

“Oh, bugger, just—fuck it,” she says. “I love you.”

“I know,” says Hawke, a smile breaking across her face like bells over Lowtown. “Just wanted to hear you say it. Love you too, by the by. No one else I’d rather starve to death with in the festering pits beneath Kirkwall.”

“I was trying to come up with a metaphor. Those are nice and subtle.”

“Write me a letter,” says Hawke, leaving a wet kiss at her neck unfurling with rosebud sweetness. “Woo me with pretension.”

Isabela looks at her with a brave sort of wonder, and closes her eyes; how happy she is, she thinks, how impossibly, stupidly, miraculously happy she is to be caved in on and covered in muck and breathing the same air as the only person in the world who understands her even when she doesn’t say anything at all. Love is overtaxed internal organs and stuttering, incoherent metaphor and being used as props for each other’s jokes.

As it turns out, Aveline’s keen self-preservation instincts _have_ kicked in, and roughly an hour later she’s working with Merrill to excavate them from their dusty tomb until they’ve made an opening in the rocks large enough for Aveline to wedge a heroic arm and a wary eye between, reaching for Isabela as Hawke urges her on first. “Oh, you sweet, beautiful thing—you too, Merrill—mm, yes, arms like the great oaks,” she says, and gets a fond smack around the shoulders when she makes a grab for Aveline’s waist. Hawke follows behind her, blinking into the coastline light, shaking dust and grime from her clothes with her hair sticking up north and south and every other direction in between.

Suddenly, it comes to Isabela that their untimely cave-in is, in fact, the perfect, most absolute metaphor for love she’s ever conceived of in all her days as an amateur woman in love and occasional purveyor of vulgar limericks detailing sweaty sexual encounters between her crewmen, expertly rhyming things like “hard” and “wet” and “pound” like it’s her full-time job: the cave-in is the point at which you fall in love, but you don’t realize it, because you never realize it until you’ve been living in your rocky crypt for so very, very long. The part where you realize you are, in fact, stuck in a dark, worm- and spider-infested pit with someone else you’re happy to be trapped with, is the sudden, numb shock of love; it’s the part where you realize you don’t care where you are or who you’ve been or what happens, because you’re stuck together, and together is where you are going. You come at each other from impossible angles and strike sparks—and that’s when you realize, too, that there was a light above you all along, and you’ll crawl right out together and into the beautiful iron-burn of the sun, alive as poetry.

That is why it’s called being _in_ love.

“I’m going to write a book,” says Isabela. From the corner of her eye, she can see the right side of Aveline’s face give one great involuntary, and also fond, twitch. “I’ve got Things To Say.”

“But does the world need to hear them,” Aveline mutters, but she’s smiling now, still with just the right side of her face. Isabela smiles with her left side in recompense.

On the way down the coast, just as the Kirkwall lamplights start to come into muzzy focus against the brassy-grey of the sky at dusk, Hawke falls into step with her and pulls a cobweb out of her hair; the day, Isabela decides, is just this side of perfect, cave-in and all. “Going to put me in your book, eh? Going to _flatter_ me with your metaphors?”

“Hawke, I will _turn you into_ a metaphor.”

“Oh my,” she murmurs, sultry-slick even as it comes out a bit hoarse from all the dust. Still dead attractive, though. “I am but a humble, innocent, unsuspecting insect being stripped bare and spun into your voluptuous web of seduction.”

“We’re going to have _so_ much fun, sweet thing. Figuratively speaking,” says Isabela, watching the twist-and-bloom of the grin on Hawke’s face, the sun and the sea and the dirt at their feet catching in her like youth, and immortality, and beauty; the solidity of Hawke’s hip sliding against her own feels like forever, and Isabela—pirate, cartographer, amateur in love, metaphor genius (but not metaphorical genius)—supposes she can handle forever with Marian Hawke. So, she turns them both around by the elbows, and kisses the twist right on the lips.


End file.
